Workday presented a plan to customers and investors at its annual conference in Las Vegas, as reported by The Register. The company wants AI agents to be paid for based on usage, and it expects those costs to come from budgets for staffing, outsourcing, and services, rather than only traditional software spending. Chief AI Officer Joel Hellermark said self-service AI agents have raised resolution rates on common tasks by 25 percent, an internal claim.
CEO Aneel Bhusri, back in the role since February, argued that usage-based pricing is better than per-seat subscription because it can grow like cloud computing bills. He also said Workday uses AI internally to avoid hiring in some areas. The company announced "headless" access to HR and finance systems, via Model Context Protocol tools and a data lake built on Apache Iceberg, with support for sharing data with Snowflake, Databricks, and Salesforce.
This analysis relies on a single source, The Register's article from October 15, 2026. With only one source, there are no conflicting reports to compare, and figures such as the 25 percent resolution-rate improvement remain vendor claims.